FAQ - Audio Memos

How can I change the playback speed?

From the list of memos, press the "i" button next to the name of the memo you want to play. This will open the detail screen. In the toolbar you will see a 1X button. If you do not see it, make sure you are using version 5.0.3 or later and make sure you have an active subscription (press the "i" button under the list of memos to see the current version of the app; from there press "Subscription" to see or activate a subscription).

When you press the 1X button, the playback speed will change. The label of the button will also change to reflect the current playback speed. Pressing the button multiple times will let you change between the following playback speeds: 0.5, 1, 1.5 and 2. You can customize one of the items in this list (the 1.5 speed) by opening the settings and adjusting the "Speed >>" setting (the green mark is equivalent to a 1x speed). Speeds lower than 1 will slow down the playback, speeds higher than 1 will speed it up.

During playback, keeping your finger pressed on the speed button will change the playback speed to the custom speed set in the settings. If you keep your finger pressed longer than 5 seconds, the playback speed will change to double the custom speed.

The speed button is useful to temporarily change the playback speed of a recording. It is also possible to permanently change the playback speed of a memo, by changing the audio data saved in the file. To do this:

press the "Edit" button on top of the list of memos,
select the memos you want to modify,
press the copy button (it is the last one in the toolbar),
change the "Speed" parameter to meet your needs (note that making a long pressed on "Speed" will show predefined speeds to choose from),
if you want the resulting recording to have the same pitch as the original one, activate the option called "Keep the current pitch" (if you do not activate it, voices will have a higher pitch if the speed is greater than 1 and will have lower pitches for speeds lower than 1),
press "Done",
choose "Replace" to replace the existing memo or choose "Create copy" to create a new memo with the selected playback speed.

As a technical note, changing the playback rate changes the audio samples saved in the file (by extrapolating current samples) unless the pitch is allowed to change and the result of "sample rate x speed" gives a common sample rate (in which case only the part of the file specifying the sample rate is changed).